51 coronavirus patients who recovered in South Korea tested positive again amid fears virus can hide in human cells and be reactivated.
Days after being released from quarantine, the patients from Daegu city have tested positive again for coronavirus.
According to Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), the virus was likely ‘reactivated.’
Experts believe the virus may lay dormant in human cells and for unknown reasons, they can be reactivated. But it is not clear if the patients become infectious again.
Some experts say in cases where patients produce a positive result two times, it is usually because of the wrong result, which occurs 1 in 5 times.
Professor Paul Hunter of the University of East Anglia said in an interview with MailOnline: “I agree that these will not be reinfections but I do not think these will be reactivations.
“Personally I think the most likely explanation is that the clearance samples were false negative.”
Prof. Hunter also said that conventional tests for coronavirus can deliver wrong result 20 to 30% of the time.
KCDC Director-General Jeong Eun-Kyeong said investigators were sent to the worst-hit region Daegu to conduct further investigation.
Japanese experts have also expressed their concerns that coronavirus patients could possibly relapse after a woman and an elderly man tested positive again.
The first case of a person being diagnosed again with coronavirus was in Osaka prefectural. The woman, who was working as a tour guide, was re-diagnosed with COVID-19 on February 26 after testing negative on February 6.
However, a study on monkeys who got infected with the virus in the lab developed immunity against it.
Professor Mark Harris of University of Leeds said: “The reports that patients who tested negative subsequently tested positive again is clearly of concern.
“It is unlikely that they would have been reinfected having cleared the virus, as they would most likely have mounted an immune response to the virus that would prevent such reinfection.
“The other possibility therefore is that they did not in fact clear the infection but remained persistently infected.”
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Replaced!